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The Noodles · Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 202 Location: China, Chengdu

Hi All

Well, I'v been in the KSA for almost 3 weeks. In fact, I'm enjoying my life here although it's still early days.

The food is good. I enjoy the company of my students, although I do find them quite different to Chinese learners, actually very different. For one, they have no ideawhat the IPA is or how to use it! Also I have noticed that they don't like being in class very much! Chinese students often jumped at the chance for a few exta minutes of leaning these guys jump at being able to leave a couple of minutes early!! Don't know what that says about me!

All of this aside, we do have an awful lot of fun in class and because it's so intense, I can see their progress much quicker than in China when I only saw students once a week.

They took me out for a lovely picknick the other night where we had to large trays of Goat Kabsa. It was so good I almost ate my fingers with it... Yes I used my hands! or should I say hand. I had never actually done this before with rice and found it pretty messy! But very enjoyable.

I went to Bahrain last week. Weird place. I'm all for seedy, don't get me wrong, but this was nuts! I didn't really end up drinking so much which seemed pretty weird to some of the other guys and myself if truth be known. I guess it had more to do with the bars we went to, I wasn't that impressed. So I ended up leaving early and going to a Sisha place. I smoke Shisha quite a lot.

Oh and I finally got to go to an Iranian Restaurant Wink

I went twice while I was out there.

Anyways, just thought I'd let you all know how things were going.

Take it easy

scot47 · Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343

IPA ? You will meet with resistance if you try introducing them to that !

The Noodles · Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 202 Location: China, Chengdu

I noticed. I guess it's hard enough learning the roman alphabet for them. Why confuse them further with th IPA.

Van Norden · Joined: 23 Oct 2004 Posts: 409

The Noodles · Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 202 Location: China, Chengdu

No but I'm dying to go. I may go next weekend, towards the Kuwaiti border area.

Cleopatra · Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 7:33 am Post subject:

veiledsentiments · Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 17644 Location: USA

Isn't that the truth Cleo... Cool

Mr Noodles... as to the IPA, only once in the Gulf was I able to use it extensively and successfully. That was teaching the foundations year of the English majors. They could see its usefulness in learning to read a dictionary and be able to properly pronounce the words. And I have to say that we had great fun with it...

VS

Cleopatra · Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 1:45 pm Post subject:

Given that Arab students of English already have to learn a totally different alphabet to the one they grew up with, I agree that there is little point in further burdening them with the IPA. That said, I once taught a Phonetics course to a group of Saudi women, and was amazed at how well they were able to use the IPA. My theory is that, since - because of their linguistic background - English orthography doesn't make much sense to them anyway (does it make sense to any of us?), they had little difficulty making sense of the much more 'logical' IPA.

We native speakers are so firmly attached to the written English word, even when it bears little or no relation to how that word is actually pronounced. Arabic speakers, of course, do not have that attachment, and, if my experience is anything to go by, can relatively easily adapt to a writing system which is even more predictable than that of their own language.